Trend Micro HouseCall 7.0 beta

I use AVG Free Edition and Earthlink PCC (from Kaspersky) as my real-time AV programs but I also like to run Trend Micro's offline scanner `sysclean.com' regularly. Trend Micro has an announcement on their website about the beta version of HouseCall online scanner and so I decided to try running it. It worked fine after downloading the definitions and other related software. I am running XP Home SP3 and IE8. It is claimed that this scanner is highly browser-independent so for example it should run on Mozilla Firefox. I don't have Firefox installed so I cannot verify this myself. Has anyone else had any experiences with this online virus scanner beta version?

 

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Not sure why it even refers to the browser since you first download a file called housecalllauncher.exe and then execute the program. The EXE is only 1.5 megs and can be used to run the program on demand. Trend Micro recommends checking the file version though to make sure you have the latest. The scan was quite fast on my system - less then five minutes. It didn't find anything suspicious, so I need to try it sometime on a known infected system and see how well it works. These free online tools are great as long as you can at least get into SAFE mode. It would be good to confirm that HouseCall 7 can install in SAFE mode (?)

 

Riddiculous... it's asking for a CD if there's none in your drive.

 

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Are you sure you got the right thing? Look here:

http://housecall.trendmicro.com/housecall7/

 

Not a bad program. I tested it on only several problem files, however it didn't detect any. Someone might have to give it a more thorough test.

 

Here too, what's the reason? Is this a new technology or does it only scan some directories?

 

As per Trend Micro:

 

I tested it on the eicar test file - no threats found

 

It's still in beta, they might have left out the definitions.

 

Serious!

 

It's like a car in beta where the steering-wheel is missing

 

Cars have steering wheels

 

Hopefully when the definitions are included, they don't leave out the 'scan now' button.

Really, looks like a good product. The samples I had were more along the lines of spyware. This might focus on the standard viruses that've been around for awhile.

 

I tested again to see if the problem appeared again (giving me a chance to check up the error), but as it incl. a new program version, they've since fixed it already.

 

I see that you already have Trend Micro real-time protection installed so it may not be worth it to frequently run a scan with almost the same detection technology. Thanks for confirming that it works on Opera. I think this is an interesting product especially because of the faster scan time than with other products such as McAfee, Panda or F-Secure which I have used. I do always temporarily disable my real-time AVG scanning while running these offline or online scanners. I don't understand what "cloud-based" detection is unless it is comparable to running a peer-to-peer based application. I know they supply a link to a technical article for those that are interested in such details.

 

eicar test is useless, try to test it against real malware

 

Not anymore - prompt on "SpotifyUpgrader.exe", just like TF once did. Then some weird exe which apparently belongs to Trend suddenly starts hogging about 50% on my C2D. It's not officially supporting Opera - it's simply a separate application.